Tuesday, 8 July 2014

Election of Judges and Independence of the European Court of Human Rights

To increase the quality and precision of its work in the election of new judges to the Court, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe has created a special committee. This committee will consist of twenty members
and meet behind closed doors in order to interview candidates for the position
of judge in the Court. It will assess whether the national selection procedures
complied with the criteria of the Parliamentary Assembly itself. The committee
will then make recommendations to the full Assembly which elects the judges. The Assembly's resolution on this can be found here and the press release here.

On a related issue, the Assembly also sought to further safeguard the independence of the Court's judges, once elected, from outside interference and undue pressure. At the end of June the Assembly adopted a Recommendation on the issue based on the report of Boriss Cilevičs, on which I blogged earlier. The recommendation relates to ratification of the Sixth Protocol to the
Council of Europe’s General Agreement on Privileges and Immunities, to revision of the judges’ social security arrangements and retirement pensions, and to improvements to their post-retirement status.

On a personal note: as regular readers have noted, blogging has been very scarce these past weeks. This is due to the grave illness and then passing away of my father: my thoughts and energies were and to an extent still are elsewhere.